Archive for the 'Today In Ironfleet' Category

So, today I noticed a wormhole in my space that opened up in Caldari high security, a horrid little backwater system I’d never heard of, with three people in local. “Aha!” I thought. “That’s why I haven’t seen anybody lately.”

So, I took the opportunity to go and get a Drake battlecruiser from my hangar. It’s a slow and brutal beast, all heavy missiles and tank. But, I thought it might be handy against Sleepers.

Once I got it home to Greater Mars (for it seems that’s what the POS proprietress and de facto Empress of Local Space has named the wormhole system I’ve been enjoying) I jumped in my Buzzard covert ops ship and went looking for something to kill.

Spent some time narrowing down weak cosmic signatures until I found a Radar site — something I’ve not found in this system hitherto. A cautious reconnoiter revealed five Sleeper cruisers sitting at something called an Unsecured Perimeter Comms Relay. If that’s unsecured, I’d hate to see secured. Somebody has a sense of humor.

Still, it looked like work for the Drake.

And such work! The cruisers died fairly easily. The next spawn was a battleship and two frigates. After killing the frigates, I engaged the battleship; and it, I was able to kill, but it was a close race between his tank and mine. I needed to launch my drones to take some of the heat off me, and I lost one of them in the process. But the Sleeper battleship died.

Then, of course, TWO battleships spawned, and two more frigates.

By the time I killed the frigates, both battleships were in range and giving my poor Drake the pounding of its life. She was holding together — barely — but my cap was dropping quickly. I chewed a bunch of the armor off of the first Sleeper battleship before I started taking armor hits my own self, which in a Drake is a clear message from God that it’s time to go. So, I went.

Back at the POS, I begged a bit of armor rep from a friendly Osprey, had a cup of coffee, borrowed a replacement drone, and considered my options. Finally I decided to load up Navy missiles and go finish the job — or at least see if there would be an impossible “Wave Four” spawn.

Fortunately, wave three was the last wave. I was able to polish off one battleship before long, and the damage from the other was tankable (barely) with what I had left. When the second battleship died, the killing was over.

All this took a lot of time, and if I hadn’t had a friendly back at the POS doing the odd system scan to assure me that I wasn’t in any danger of interruption from hostile pod pilots, my stress level would have been extreme.

And then, it was time for looting! And codebreaking!

First the loot and salvage, from 3x battleships, 5x cruisers, and 4x frigates:

After this morning’s stomping of the hapless gas-mining destroyer, I had to go out and do non-EVE things in the real world. (Believe it or not, I don’t get to play EVE 24/7 — pout!)

When I came back, guess what I found at the same gas cloud?

Yup, my gas miners were back “in force” — three battle cruisers, the destroyer again, and a Bestower industrial. According to my scans, there was nobody else (except of course the always-possible cloakers) in the system, so back I went in my Caracal of Doom.

The Bestower blew up in two volleys. I guess it wasn’t aligned, because I was shooting from a full hundred clicks out:

That was three volleys. Two of the battle cruisers are just milling about, still, but the third, a Ferox, looks like he’s trying to close the range. He’s no sniper, that’s for sure, because he’s 75 klicks out and still hasn’t locked me. I motor away from him and begin lobbing missiles.

Nineteen volleys later, he warped away in deep armor, without ever having target locked me or gotten closer than about 65 klicks.

Somewhere during this exchange, the other two battle cruisers warped off; and I guess I expected that somebody in system was trying to get a warp in point on my little cruiser so they could come back and stomp on my head. But, it didn’t happen. An associate of mine had time to come in a small fast salvager, salvage the wrecks, loot the mods, look at the gas volume, go and get a hauler, and come back for the gas. Meanwhile, I orbited at range to provide a bit of protection. The only person who came back was Serleanka Darkwater, the Bestower pilot, who jumped in and out in her pod about three times to observe the cleanup process.

Twenty minutes later, when I checked, I was alone in the system as far as my probes could tell me.

I am now officially LOVING w-space and the Apocrypha expansion. This was aggressive salvage in the best Ironfleet tradition, and the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Of course, I don’t think for a moment that targets this fat will be found in w-space for long; these people are acting like they are mining in Empire belts under the full protection of Concord. That’s got to stop, as the carnage mounts up. But I plan to enjoy it while it lasts.

Here in w-space, where (as you probably assumed from my last post) I have at least temporary access to a rather well-equipped POS, I’ve been having a lot of fun doing “casual” gaming, sitting at the POS like a spider at the center of a web. Working at other projects on my other screen, from time to time I can scan “my” system to see what ships might be in it. And then, if I feel like it, I can scan them down and — if they seem tasty — land on their head with a pile of missiles.

This morning, my scans showed me a destroyer, an assault frigate, and a battlecruiser, all at the same spot. So I hopped in my trusty Caracal of Doom (yeah, I know, but it’s a very cheap platform on a per-tube basis for delivery of heavy missiles) and went to see where the party was.

I found the battlecruiser and the assault frig at a gas mining site, although the destroyer was nowhere visible. So, I started launching on the assault frig, but being at a great distance, he was able to warp out in armor. Transferring my missile affections to the battlecruiser, he, too, decided to go elsewhere.

Fun, but not profitable.

Returning to the center of my web, I resumed scanning. The battlecruiser and the assault frigate eventually left the system, but the destroyer seemed to be warping around. A bit of time passed.

I scanned again. There’s the destroyer — alone? — at the gas site.

About ninety seconds later, heavy missiles began landing on his head. He never had a chance:

Gas Cloud Harvester I
Small ‘Accommodation’ Vestment Reconstructer I
Small Shield Extender I
Photonic CPU Enhancer I
Salvager I
Small Tractor Beam I, Qty: 2
Hornet I (Drone Bay)

I was particularly pleased to see the gas harvester, as those are currently on my shopping list; it was nice to have one delivered to w-space for me. The tractor beams, too, are nice loot to get, although I’m not sure what use they are for a gas-miner, or why they were fitted.

For the time being, Ironfleet is operating in w-space. You’ll understand if the details are kept a little bit obscure for reasons of operational security, but we’re concentrated in a specific system and interested in defending our interests there from casual intruders.

So, the new routine is, when I log in, the first thing to do is scan the system for unwelcome vessels. This morning, that turned me up a Brutix. Closer investigation showed the Brutix to be at a new wormhole to highsec. Oddly, the Brutix was about 100km from the wormhole and powering away (slowly) in a random direction. AFK?

Now, as it happens, for logistical reasons there was nobody but me handy to deal with this terrible crisis, and I didn’t have any serious combat ship that would normally be able to kill a Brutix in a heads-up fight. The pilot, Ceist Mashal of Jericho Industries [JRCO], North Domain Defense Forces [Honor], is a 2007 character, so this could be a properly-fitted, well-piloted encounter.

On the other hand, he could be AFK, or distracted with his face glued to the scanning interface. And I do have a Sleeper-killing caracal. What’s the worst that could happen, he warps off?

So, I warp on him at about 70 clicks out, and commence firing volleys of heavy missiles. He targets me back (auto targetback? Promising!) but never launches a drone or fires a gun. A dozen volleys later (with no evidence he ever turned on a tank module of any kind) he’s in a pod. Two more volleys and the pod is toast.

The wreck was way over there, and I’m in a slow-ass boat, so I went to swap ships. And when I came back, the wreck had been looted. Given my frequent scanning, this implies a cloaker. Was he AFK and two-boxing his covert ops ship? I’m not sure. But the killmails look good:

Update: Later in the day I spoke with a Taranis pilot who was flying top gun for a squadron of battleships farming sleeper rats. He told me his covert ops alt watched this kill, looted the wreck when I left, and gave the loot back to Ceist Mashal.

Hey, everybody. Sorry for the long silence; I’ve mostly been messing about on the test server (Singularity aka Sisi) trying out the new scanning/probing system and looking at the incoming content.

Until today, I was mostly flying a covert ops ship for the scanning bonuses, so I stayed well away from the actual sites inside the wormhole systems where the new Sleepers spawn. The stories coming back from more intrepid explorers have been rather daunting, with rumors of entire fleets getting wiped.

Of course, given all the free ships on Sisi, the Game Development Forum threads have also been alive with “oh, it’s not hard to solo the easier sites, I went in in my rigged Nightmare and it was cake, especially with my full implant set” reports. Well, bully for you; but when this goes live, I personally don’t have much interest in taking expensive T2 hulls into a gankable 0.0-style hell-death, with no local chat to even tell me if there are enemies in my system. Nope, if I can’t do this in cheap ships, it’s not going to get done by me.

Now, mind you, I’m not against flying with friends; that’s gonna be necessary for most of the new content no matter what you’re flying. But the other feature of W-space (the unreliable and ever-shifting wormhole access) means that no matter who you go in with, you’re likely to wind up alone in the dark. At that point, are you just doomed to wander in a wasteland of pointlessness? Or, will there still be some business a solo pilot in a cheap ship can conduct?

That’s what I set out to discover today, and since nobody else on Sisi seems interested in testing that, I figured I’d just have to do it myself.

So, first, I grabbed a covert ops ship and scanned me down a wormhole. It wasn’t hard; there were no cosmic signatures in my home system, so I jumped one jump over (to another .7 system) and found one. Probing it out took about ten minutes with the new scanning system, which is getting very easy to use while still providing a mental challenge.

After finding the wormhole, I checked its description. It promised to take me to “unknown space”, as opposed to the more dangerous “dangerous unknown” or “deadly unknown” space that are the other two options. Cool! I bookmarked it and went to see what was in my hangar for cheap.

What I found was a gank Caracal, left over from my faction warfare days. 5 T2 heavy missile launchers high, a large shield extender and a medium shield booster middle, and ballistic control units (T2) low. Plus a warp disruptor and some signal boosters. Nothing fancy, nothing special, nothing ridiculously expensive.

Jumped in, went back to the wormhole, jumped through. Used my on-board scanner to find a few cosmic anomalies, did the cancel-warp trick to make their names pop up on the system map. Then warped to them, in succession, at 100km to have a look.

The easiest looking one was a “Frontier Camp” with six sleeper frigates and two sentry guns. I got to work.

The sentry guns hit me hard but variously, in amounts from 200 to 1200 hitpoints each. Their rate of fire, however, was very slow. I was able to pop a frigate before I had to warp out to save my armor — no way to repair my armor in here!

I was using Caldari Navy Scourge missiles, but I only had the ones in my launchers — after that, it was a choice of precision lights (which proved to do less damage) or regular Scourges — which seemed to work just fine and almost as well as the Navy ones.

So I warped out, repaired my shields, let my cap recharge, and warped back in. The site was between two planets, so I came in from a different side each time, giving me a chance to use range against the rapidly-closing frigates. This second time in, the sentry guns were closer and hurt worse; by the time I popped a frigate and warped out, I’d suffered a substantial armor dent. Must be more careful.

Third trip in, I popped two frigates and dented one sentry gun, but there was a new spawn — six more frigs and a cruiser. At this point, I decided to take out the sentry guns, which were a far bigger danger than the ships seemed to be.

That took maybe six more passes before they went down. But after that, it was cake — the frigs dropped easily and the cruiser, easily enough. Then the final wave — three cruisers and a few more frigs — popped.

I had to warp away after popping the frigs and one cruiser, then come back and finish the other two. Interestingly, at no time did any of the Sleeps use any kind of ECM on me; I was never webbed or scrambled. Sleepers DOuse this tech, by all reports, so I either I got lucky, or there are modest and minor sites where they aren’t programmed to do it.

All told, it may have taken me a couple hours to finish playing patty-cake with these sleeper boys, but in the end, the site was done. The wreckage was promising — probably not enough, depending on the final price of T3 parts, to justify the time, but not worthless by any means either. Total loot and salvage (I had to go for a salvage boat) was about 120 cubic meters, breaking down as follows:

The three ancient salvage items marked with asterisks have the color of icon we currently associate with the unbroken salvage for making Tech II rigs.

So, what did I learn?

Remember the question I set out to answer: is there Sleeper content that a solo player can beat in a cheap boat? I’d say the answer is, conclusively, yes, even if there’s probably far more content that’s too tough to do this way.

What’s really fun about my answer, though, is that what one cheap boat can do, more cheap boats can do better. Missiles seem to work well against sleepers, but some remote repping would really have sped things up. A couple of T1 logistics cruisers (dirt cheap) and anything else crunchy enough to bring some DPS while buffertanking the worst of the Sleeper DPS should work a treat.

It’s important to remember that all the time I was doing this, I was NOT worrying a whit about who might be sneaking up on me to player-gank me. On Sisi, it’s against the rules, and it doesn’t matter anyway. On Tranquility, it would have been suicide to do what I did — or at least, it would have required a lot more care and attention to my directional scanner. With a gang, you’ll probably have a cloaking prober who stands aside from the combat and keeps an eye out for enemies. In fact, I’m thinking one of my cloaking Prowler blockade runners would be great for this duty — keep a probe launcher in the second high slot, carry reloads for the troops and haul all the loot home, with primary responsibility during combat of maintaining continuous scans for enemy player ships. (A Badger II would work just as well, to be honest, as long as the pilot was willing to stay in continuous motion.)

All in all, I came away enthusiastic for the possibilities. Now it only remains to find out whether the ISK value of the w-space resources makes it worth the trouble.

Last night, late, the starmap showed a vast quiet all the way up the very long Querious pipe I traveled to get to Delve. So, I decided to head for Empire. Like my previous trip to 0.0, this one was interesting and exciting and mostly profitless; the compromises needed for solo safety are fairly solidly designed, I’d say, to prevent much chance of enrichment.

The trip home was almost uneventful, though I did meet two gentlemen in Vagabonds camping my exit gate in a system I was passing through. They chased me through the gate but did not catch me on the other side, then raced ahead to try again at the next gate. I decided to take a little break and catch up on my personal hygiene. They were long gone by the time I came back to my keyboard.

I must admit, though, that I’m intrigued by the wealth that’s sitting unmolested in empty 0.0 systems, one after the other, as far as a wandering salvager can see. I’ve read about people ratting in cloakable ships, who merely sit patiently under cloak when enemies are in the system. The idea has some merit, but to do it all in one ship (ratting, looting, salvaging, getting the loot home in decent quantities) sounds very difficult. And it would also be difficult (not impossible, just difficult, maybe taking multiple tries) to get an unescorted battleship into position.

I find myself musing, however, about how much fun it would be if one could magically arrive in 0.0 in an Orca. Imagine if one had an alt (no great imaginative leap) who had an Orca stuffed to the gills with useful ships (a Cerberus, say, or even some Caracals fitted to kill rats from extreme range with heavy missiles; a basilisk fitted as a buffer-tanked salvage cruiser with tractors and salvagers; maybe a Prowler full of missiles in the ship maintenance bay; a covert ops frigate or six; that kind of stuff.) If you in whatever ship and your alt in said Orca were transported by some miraculous means (imagine if a wormhole opened in the fabric of spacetime and sucked you through) to a quiet 0.0 system, you could rat in peace for weeks at a time. The Orca would cloak when logged in, but be logged out most of the time for safety; you could rat (hiding patiently when visitors arrived) and salvage and work out of a constellation of anchored giant secure cans, logging in the Orca infrequently to service the cans, collect the loot, and replenish any ammo or lost ships.

The only flaw I see is that eventually you’d want to get the Orca home again. But — and this is key — at current market prices, you can *insure* the bloody thing for a hundred and twenty million ISK, and get back a hefty fraction of its purchase price on ship loss. So it’s not inconceivable that you could eventually lose the Orca (perhaps while following more rifts in the fabric of spacetime hoping for another miracle) and still profit, especially if you first sent your loots home by normal routes in the cargo hold of a careful Prowler pilot.

When I logged out last night, I was in a system with Kudzu (Kinzoku?) sov. This morning? No sov.

I also got a chance to test scooping under POS guns this morning. There was a giant secure can drifting outside a force field, and the gun batteries were not intimidatingly large. So I did a cloaked sneak in on the can, aligned to an exit, uncloaked, scooped, and got the hell out.

I assume the guns were set to fire on everybody, but in the few seconds I was visible on grid, I saw no signs that they were even targeting me.

The can, sadly, was empty — but in Delve, if I want to put it on the market in a Blood Raider station, it’s worth about two million ISK.

The roid belts here, by the way, are so huge and fat that they routinely decloak me when I warp in at 100 km. Please send hulks.

One fun thing I found in one of the belts was an Officer wreck — the empty wreck of Raysere Giant. Do you get Tech II salvage from an officer wreck? I dunno, this is the first one I’ve ever seen. But, reasoning by analogy from the Dread Guristas who sometimes spawn in high sec space, you ought to, right?

It seemed like a subject worth some research.

The problem being, a full spawn of Blood Raider rats. Which means, after about three cycles of my salvager, I have to warp away to lose the agro. Rinse, lather, repeat.

I believe it was my seventh visit to the wreck that finally gave me a salvaging success. And what a success! Salvage yielded:

14x Nanite Compound
10x Power Conduit

Woot! That’s about five million ISK worth of salvage at Jita prices, not that I ever sell TII salvage. At least now I won’t be going home empty-handed.

In Delve. Actually docked at a Blood Raiders NPC station for the first time in my EVE career. Wished fervently that I’d filled my cargo hold with drones and ammo before setting out. Sadly, I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to get this far.

I’ve done a little more salvage, but haven’t found anything spectacular yet. There are a lot of hostiles floating around down here, and even in my blockade runner, it would be easy to get caught.

Updates to be provided as events warrant.

Market question: When I look at the region-wide market in Delve, I see orders in NPC stations and in player-owned outposts. It’s my understanding that those outposts usually forbid docking rights to strangers. Does that mean, if I place a region-wide buy order, that there’s a risk the order will be filled in a place where it’s impossible for me to to pick up the goods?